With some effort, Arne pried himself off the ground. His face was bloated and red, and bits of gravel and dirt stuck to his jacket and jeans. He took a single lurching step toward Gage and stopped, grabbing his wrist and glaring with as much hatred as Gage had ever seen anyone look at him—and he'd dealt with quite an assortment of nasty characters over the years.
"Asshole!" Arne cried.
"Now, now," Gage said. "Let's not go down that road again."
"I'm going to get the damn chief of police, that's what I'm going to do!"
"Sounds good. He's a dear friend of mine."
"Yeah! Well—well, we'll see!"
With that witty retort out of the way, he retreated to his black Expedition. The door slammed, the engine roared, and the tires spit up gravel as Arne Cooper made his hasty departure, giving Gage a middle-fingered salute on his way past. In return, Gage offered up his best pearly white smile. He was still watching the trailing gravel smoke, enjoying the way it dissipated into the morning mist, when he heard the creak of floorboards behind him.
Turning, he saw Zoe leaning against the wall, dressed in black sweatpants and a sleeveless gray Radiohead T-shirt. Her smile was even broader than the one Gage had given Arne.
"That was awesome," she said.
* * *
Gage had just enough time to shower, dress, and make a pot of coffee before Percy Quinn showed up on his doorstep—looking even more dour than usual in his gray trench coat, hands stuffed deep into the pockets, shaking his head before Gage had even said a word. Zoe had left for a morning walk on the beach a few minutes earlier.
"Cream?" Gage asked, handing him a mug.
"You know I take it black," Quinn said.
"I always figure it's rude not to ask."
"When have you ever worried about being rude?"
"Oh, I worry about it all the time. But worrying about it and being able to stop myself are two different things. I'm a rude addict."
"You're an asshole addict is what you are."
"I'm not even sure what that means, but it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside when you talk to me that way."
The two of them settled at the kitchen table. The bright morning light, shining through the high windows in the A-frame, was not kind to Gage's dusty bookshelves, torn and discolored leather furniture, and threadbare carpet. There were so many magazines, crossword-puzzle books, and newspapers piled on the table that it took Quinn a moment to spot the .38 sitting in the middle of it, nose pointed toward the far wall.
"That it?" Quinn said.
"Yep."
"You put it out here to give it to me?"
"Yep."
"You could have just given it to him and saved me a trip."
"That's true."
"But you didn't."
"Nope."
Quinn sighed. He picked up the revolver, checked the safety, then slipped it into the pocket of his trench coat. He took a sip of his coffee. Gage took a sip of his—with a dash of Irish cream, just the way he liked it. Irish cream may not have been all that manly, but he'd stopped worrying about being manly years ago. Not that he ever worried about it much. In his experience, men who worried about being manly were missing the point of being men.
"Arne says you stole it from him," Quinn said. "He wants to press charges."
"You want to take me down to the station and book me?"
"How about you just start with how you came about having it in your possession."
"Oh, I'm pretty sure you already know the answer to that question, Chief."
"The kid gave it to you?"
"He has a name. It's Jeremiah."
"I thought he went by Jerry?"
"Nope."
"Huh. All these years, I've been calling him Jerry."
"Says more about you than him."
Quinn's big eyebrows dropped, his eyes narrowing. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means that you made an assumption instead of making the effort to find out what he preferred. Don't feel too bad though. That's what most people do."
"He could have just corrected me," Quinn said.
"I suppose that's true, Perry."
"You know my first name is Percy."
"Oh, is that what you prefer?"
They stared at each other over the table, steam rising from their coffee mugs. It wasn't a staring contest as much as the inevitable outcome of two men who shared little in common and quickly ran out of things to say. The room was filled not so much with anger and hostility as resignation and world-weariness. Here they were again. The universe always seemed to conspire to bring them together despite their best intentions to stay as far from one another as possible. With a shrug, Quinn took another sip from his coffee, then stood.
"Well," he said.
"Give my best to your wife. Her migraines gotten any better?"
"A little. Gage, listen."
"Uh-oh, that sounded serious."
"Just a warning. People in this town really like Arne Cooper. You've got to know that."
"It must be his winning personality," Gage said.
"It has more to do with him winning the Class 4A state football championships two out of the last five years."
"Or it could be that," Gage said.
"I'm just saying, it might be best not to get on his bad side."
"Might be too late for that."
"Yeah, but I know you. You can't leave things alone. I'm just saying you might want to leave it alone this time."
"Leave what alone? There's nothing there."
"That's what I mean. There's nothing there right now. Then you'll make all that nothing into something, and I'll have all kinds of trouble on my hands."
"I love it when you talk in riddles."
"This town isn't all that sure about you, Gage. You've brought it a bunch of bad publicity the last few years. So far, you're tolerated. But they can turn on you in a hurry."
"Does that mean I'll have to drop out of my Tuesday book club at the public library? I was so looking forward to the discussion on Anna Karenina."
Quinn sighed. He studied Gage the way he might study a nasty stain on his carpet, one he couldn't get rid of no matter how hard he tried. That's what Gage was, after all. A stain. A stain on the city. Gage had no illusions about that. And that was just fine by him. He didn't need Barnacle Bluffs any more than it needed him. It was just a place to live. If it wasn't for Zoe, he could leave on a whim. But until the day came when Zoe wasn't part of the equation, Gage wasn't going anywhere.
On his way out the door, Quinn said over his shoulder, "Just don't make things any worse with Arne, okay? If you can do that at least, I'd appreciate it."
"I'll do my best," Gage said.
Though Gage knew, the way he always knew these things, that there was a good chance he and Arne Cooper would be running into each other again.
Chapter 4
It took a fair amount of convincing and cajoling, but Gage managed to persuade Zoe to let him drop her off at the apartment building next to the community college. Her Toyota was in the shop anyway—the brakes were on their last legs—and she needed a ride. Things weren't exactly back to normal between them, but they were at least on speaking terms, and he couldn't bear the thought of her slipping out of his house without so much as a handshake.
"Not too late to change your mind," Gage said, speaking loud enough to be heard over the wind. "I hear Eugene is beautiful this time of year."
She flashed him the evil eye before returning her attention to the highway, clutching the black duffel bag in her lap a little tighter. She tapped her sandals against the floorboard in a fast beat, a nervous twitch that wasn't at all like her. Seeing her nervous made him nervous. The way she sat in the van's passenger seat, hunched and still, made her seem small and girlish, as if she were on her way to her first day of kindergarten instead of college. He also noted with some amusement that though she was dressed in her usual black jeans and black T-shirt, her spiky hair was its normal brow
n and she wore only a single nose stud, an emerald so small it could have been a mole.
The sun gleamed so brightly on the highway that Gage had to squint, even wearing sunglasses. The ocean, a rich aquamarine, was as still as an oil painting. For a late September day on the Oregon coast, especially at not even ten in the morning, it was unusually warm. They drove with the windows down, the cool air whipping through the van. The Volkswagen's engine was obnoxiously loud, the rumble punctuating the occasional disturbing clang. Zoe had been pestering him to take it into the shop for weeks, but she said nothing today. She wasn't even listening to her iPod.
Just beyond the edge of town, past the Horseshoe Mall where Alex's bookstore was located, they crossed the single-lane bridge over the marshy inlet and reached Old Timer Road. They turned east, away from the ocean, and drove past the city's fenced-in power station, a storage center, and a marine mechanic before crossing into a dense cluster of Douglas firs. After they scaled a short but steep hill, the forest opened into a clearing.
With a half-dozen squat, rectangular buildings connected by patchy lawns and cracked sidewalks, Barnacle Bluffs Community College looked more like an oversize high school than a junior college, though the thick forest surrounding it all gave the place the feel of a fairy tale. Most of the cars, and there were plenty of them, were clustered around the largest of the buildings, a big tan monstrosity at the edge of campus. It was five stories, ivy choking the windows on the bottom floor, the tiny decks on the upper floors boxed in with rusty black iron rails.
"That's it," Zoe said.
"Looks like a prison," Gage said.
"It's just a place to sleep."
"And there's no cafeteria?"
Zoe sighed. "No. I told you. It's more like an apartment. I'll have to cook my own food."
"When have you ever cooked?"
She didn't dignify this with an answer. He parked behind a blue Ford Escort. There were people everywhere—mostly young people carrying boxes, TVs, and stereos, but a fair amount of parents as well. Two girls carrying suitcases walked past on the sidewalk, saw Zoe, and waved. She waved back.
"Know them?" Gage asked.
"Nope," Zoe said.
Outside, it smelled of fir and moss and damp earth; he couldn't even smell the ocean. They could have been in the foothills of the Cascades rather than a short hop to the beach. Between the two of them, they were able to get all Zoe's things in one load. It wasn't much. She lugged two suitcases in addition to the hiking pack on her back and the duffel bag slung over her shoulder. He carried two large cardboard boxes, one stacked on top of the other, each helpfully labeled ZOE'S STUFF in black marker. The first step on with right knee, though, was murder.
"You sure?" Zoe said. "What about your cane?"
"I'm fine," Gage said.
"I don't want you to hurt—"
"I said I'm fine."
He clearly wasn't fine—it was as if he had a bag of crushed glass inside his knee—but he wasn't about to admit it to Zoe.
Limping past a blue Suburban, he saw a pretty young woman in tight jeans and a sleeveless yellow blouse that bared her midriff struggling to retrieve a mini fridge from the back. A spindly young man watched. Or at least Gage assumed he was watching. His hair, shoe-polish black, hung so low on his face that Gage couldn't see his eyes. It was long on the sides and in the back as well, wispy, the kind of hair that didn't look good on men. He wore a long gray trench coat over a plain white T-shirt, the lapels covered with various colorful buttons.
At first glance, he thought the young woman was his girlfriend, judging by her teenybopper outfit, slim figure, and the stylish cut of her chestnut hair. Even when he got a better look at her face and saw the telltale giveaways of age that even an expert makeup job couldn't hide completely, he would have pegged her as a slightly older sister until the young man spoke.
"Mom," he pleaded softly, "I can do it."
"I got it, I got it!" she snapped at him.
"Mom—"
"Shh!"
She was so small and frail—it was a toss-up which of them was thinner, her or her son—that it was as if she were trying to wrestle a tank out of the back of the Suburban. She put it down hard enough that the metal clanged like a bell, drawing the attention of people around them.
The woman saw Gage and smiled. He smiled back and tried to hide his limp as he trudged along the sidewalk. He debated about offering to help her, but he knew that it was one thing for him to grit his teeth and carry a few boxes; it was another to carry a fridge. Better to smile politely and walk on past. Zoe, however, stopped next to the boy.
"Hi," she said.
If the kid glanced at her, the mop of black hair made it impossible to tell. Without moving his head, he mumbled a hello. He was quite short, shorter than Zoe, and thinner than her as well. His baby face probably would have given him trouble even getting into a PG-13 movie. Even the trench coat did little to give him any bulk. The buttons, Gage saw, pictured characters from various science-fiction television shows: Chewbacca, Mr. Spock, Rod Serling, and many others Gage didn't recognize.
"You Connor?" Zoe said.
Now the kid glanced at her. "Yeah. How'd you know?"
"Jeremiah."
"Oh," Connor said, brightening a little. "He here yet?"
"I don't know. I'm Zoe, by the way. I'm one of his best friends."
"Cool," Connor said.
It was a very fast, whispered exchange. He seemed to be shrinking into his trench coat.
"Who's Jeremiah?" the woman asked.
"My friend," Connor said.
"The one you met at the Star Wars convention?"
"Star Trek," Connor corrected her, not even attempting to hide his disdain.
"Oh, right." She looked from Zoe to Gage. "I'm Berry, by the way. Bernadette, actually, but everybody calls me … Are you okay?"
It took Gage a second to realize she was talking to him. Even putting most of his weight on his left leg, the pain in his right knee was almost unbearable, but he thought he'd been doing a pretty job of hiding it. No such luck, apparently. He desperately wanted to set the boxes on the ground, but now that she'd called him out, he couldn't bring himself to do it.
"Just fine," he said.
"You don't look fine. Your face is all … sweaty."
"It's just a little warm, that's all."
"This is Garrison," Zoe said. "He's my stepdad."
"Oh! Well, nice to meet you, Garrison. You have nice eyes."
"Mom," Connor pleaded.
"Well, he does!"
The way Berry said it, it wasn't like she was just complimenting Gage's eyes. It was as if she was saying she wanted to meet at a hotel later. The assertive sexuality combined with her girlish appearance was an odd combination. Gage guessed she was at least in her early thirties, which wasn't outside the realm of possibility for him, but he still felt a certain amount of skeeviness even considering the possibility, mostly because of how she dressed. It was like fantasizing about a high school cheerleader.
"We're from Waldport," she said. "You two live in Barnacle Bluffs?"
"That's right," Gage said.
"It's nice that there's an adult nearby. I should get your number if there's ever an emergency."
"Mom," Connor admonished her. "I am an adult now."
"Oh, of course sweetie. I just meant an older adult. Let me get my purse. I'll give you my card. It's got my work number on it—I'm a massage therapist—but that's really the best way to get ahold of me. You have a cell phone?"
Zoe snickered. "He's morally opposed to them."
"What?" Berry said.
Before Gage could explain, someone shouted "Connor!" behind them. It was a familiar voice. They turned and spotted Jeremiah across the parking lot, carrying a giant blue plastic tote. Except for his hair, which was reddish brown and even shorter than the last time Gage had seen him, he could have been Connor's twin. He was dressed in a similar trench coat, complete with buttons, and he was smiling like a kid
who'd just come down Christmas morning to piles of presents. That was what surprised Gage the most, the smile, since he couldn't remember Jeremiah ever smiling. And certainly not like that, with such pure and unadulterated joy.
Connor replied with a high-wattage smile of his own, lifting his slim hand in a wave.
There were hundreds of people in the parking lot, but it was a private moment shared by just the two of them. It lasted only a second. Carrying a blue tote of his own, dressed in his usual ill-fitting green windbreaker, Arne Cooper stepped next to his son. People often used the expression "cast a shadow over the proceedings," but this was one case when it appeared to be literally true.
Arne, hulking and huge, the kind of man who probably ate school buses for breakfast, towered over his son, and it was a sad thing to watch Jeremiah wilt before their eyes—eyes drooping, shoulders slumping, the smile withering and leaving the same blank mask. Arne stared across the parking lot and met their gaze, zeroing in on Gage. No blank mask on that one. All kinds of fear and hatred flickered across the big man's face before he turned away, nudging his son in the back, prodding him to continue walking. Gage sighed.
"I hear Eugene is beautiful this time of year," he said.
Chapter 5
For nearly five years, before Zoe came to live with him, Gage had been comfortable with an empty house. In fact, except for the ten years he'd been married to Janet, he'd spent most of his life alone. He expected to be comfortable with loneliness again, as he always was. It wasn't that he didn't miss people—he still missed Janet so much it ached, a hole that could never be filled—but he knew how to deal with it. He didn't fight loneliness, as so many people did. He simply embraced it. Some, including his dear friend Alex, might even say he wallowed in it.
But this was different. For the first few days after Zoe's departure, he tried to find comfort in his routines. He walked to the little corner grocery down the hill in the morning, picking up the Oregonian (and the Bugle, if it was out that day), any newsmagazines he hadn't read, and a couple of poppy-seed muffins. Maybe the night's dinner, if he needed it. He worked his way through a crossword puzzle. He read his books, usually history with the occasional novel thrown in for variety. He took a nap. He did some afternoon chores, either projects outside, like fixing the rain gutter or trimming the rhoddies, or indoor cleaning, which he detested. He took an evening walk on the beach and had an early bourbon, varying the order depending on his mood. At night, he usually fell asleep reading in his chair. The weather made little difference in these routines. On the Oregon coast, it could change in the span of five minutes anyway.
The Lovely Wicked Rain: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series) Page 3
